She meets her abuser within her first few months in Iowa City, and stays in the relationship throughout the rest of her time there, even when her girlfriend moves to Bloomington, Indiana, to attend another MFA program. In the Dream House spans the several years that Machado was a graduate student at the University of Iowa’s MFA program. “I enter into the archive that domestic abuse between partners who share a gender identity is both possible and not uncommon,” Machado writes at the start of the book, “and that it can look something like this.” Machado lists the reasons that these stories have been silenced: fear of undermining an empowering queer movement, an overwhelming narrative of woman as abused and never as abuser, and so on.

It is also an attempt to address the absence of stories about abuse between same-gender partners. It is Machado’s first book of nonfiction, and it complements her successful collection of short stories, Her Body and Other Parties, as both draw on fairy tale and science fiction to build full and complicated worlds for her characters.īut Machado’s memoir is not only a harrowing and enchanting journey into her past. In the Dream House is a maze of emotion and analysis. With bewitching, at times chant-like prose, Machado invites the reader into her dream house, lets us look in all the closets and the empty rooms and watch as she recreates, or resurrects-as she writes that all good memoirs should-what it was like to live for several years with an abusive partner.

“You are being tested and you are passing the test sweet girl, sweet self, look how good you are look how loyal, look how loved.” That is how scary, Machado means to say, how incongruous and entrapping an abusive relationship can be. “This is how you are toughened,” Machado writes to the fairy-tale wife and to a younger version of herself. Though it frightens her, this fairy-tale figure manages to convince herself that it’s completely normal. Take, for example, this nightmarish moment from a fairy tale, described by Machado to show her reader the contradictory, illogical feelings she had about her then-girlfriend: the mythical Bluebeard’s young wife watches, horrified, as her new husband dances with the corpses of his former wives. One question is persistent throughout Carmen Maria Machado’s new memoir about an abusive same-gender relationship: How did we get here? Followed, usually, by: Is this the last straw? In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

In the dream house carmen maria machado